Earlier this month, when Instagram announced its user community had grown to more than 400 million, it reminded me that I needed to update my curated collection of Instagram for Nonprofit resources. As a content curator, I’m not just on the hunt for learning and sharing snippets of the new or what’s buzzing. Content curation is ultimately organizing, synthesizing, presenting, and maintaining your resource collections.

I don’t always share links as I find them, but because I use content curation to support curriculum development for my training work, I like to share collections that are organized so people can take an hour or so and get up to speed on a topic or to use if you are doing a training.

Instagram Overview

Here’s the basics:

Instagram is a free application for iPhone or Android that lets people take photos, apply filters to change the look of the photos and then share them. Users can share them on Instagram while also choosing to share them to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare. It was created in 2010 and purchased by Facebook in 2012 (more history here). As of September, 2015, Instagram had 400 Million users.

Instagram has a couple of marketing benefits. It’s a great branding tool because it can engage audiences, creative intimacy, and appeals to the emotions. It is superb for visual storytelling about your organization, its stakeholders, and results. The idea that “pictures do the talking” is also appealing to younger audiences which is why Instagram is popular with Gen Z and Gen Y.

Nonprofit Examples and Getting Started or Rebooting A Strategic Approach

If you want to or reboot your nonprofits Instagram presence, spend some time looking at nonprofit examples to get inspired:

Your first step is listening and observing to gain some insights for your strategy. You should do some searching on key hashtags that your nonprofit uses as Instagram is big on hashtags and that’s how you can effectively build your following. Social Rank is an excellent tool to identify potential like-minded influencers and explore hashtags that align with your objectives and audience.

Best Practices and Tips for Nonprofits

Here several excellent recent posts for nonprofits that want to use Instagram: